She’s plotting a farewell tour. She’s starring in a documentary about her life. And she could only ever be herself.
One Friday afternoon in May, Cyndi Lauper stepped out of her Upper West Side apartment building and into the streets of New York City. She wore glitter-encrusted glasses, sneakers with rainbow soles and a stack of beaded bracelets on each arm. A rice-paper parasol swung in her hand. As she walked, she examined the crowds and remarked when glints of interest caught her eye.
“Of course, up here it’s fashion hell,” she allowed of her tony neighbourhood. And yet, every few blocks, she rubbernecked at another woman’s look, her famous New Yawk accent lifting and tumbling in pleasure at what she saw:
“Look at these dames; how cute are they?
“Did you love those pants? I kind of loved those pants.
“Look at this lady,” she said, stepping off the curb and clocking a passerby. The woman moved nimbly, tomato-red streak in her silver hair, body draped in shades of fuchsia and cherry as she pushed the gleaming metal frame of a walker. “Fabulous,” Lauper exclaimed. “Come on!”
At 70, the pop icon and social justice activist isn’t just charging back into the streets. On June 3, Lauper announced her final tour, the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour, which will have her headlining arenas across North America from late October to early December. And Let the Canary Sing, a documentary about her life and career that premiered at the Tribeca Festival last year.
Lauper has not staged a major tour — “a proper tour, that’s mine” — in over a decade. But now her window of opportunity is closing, so she’s leaping through it. “I don’t think I can perform the way I want to in a couple of years,” she said. “I want to be strong.”
And until recently, when she finally agreed to sit for director Alison Ellwood, she could not envision committing her life story to film. “I wasn’t going to do a documentary because I’m not dead,” she said. More to the point, she did not feel particularly misunderstood. From the moment she danced across the city in the 1983 video for Girls Just Want to Have Fun, she felt that she had articulated precisely what she wanted to say.
“Everything I wanted them to understand was in that video,” she said of her fans. She has a lot of people who get her: The clip has been viewed on YouTube more than 1 billion times. Forty years later, she holds it up as a thesis, the key to decoding her artistic perspective and understanding everything that followed. After all, “you never have to wonder where a New Yorker stands,” she said. “They’ll tell you, straight up.”
Cyndi Lauper, born in Brooklyn, raised in Queens, bopped around the house to Beatles songs, her older sister, Elen, singing Paul McCartney’s parts and Lauper taking John Lennon’s. It was her earliest lesson in harmony and song structure. But when she left home at 17, it was with a copy of Yoko Ono’s feminist conceptual art book Grapefruit in her hands.
Ono taught her that “you can create art in your head, and then you can view things differently,” Lauper said. This attitude served her well as she tried (and often failed) to work as a painter, a shoe salesperson, a racetrack hot walker, an IHOP waitress, a gal Friday at Simon & Schuster and the singer in a cover band.
Singing other people’s music in Long Island clubs and dive bars, Lauper struggled to find her place. She tried to channel Janis Joplin, but “I was stuck inside her body, and she didn’t like it, and I didn’t like it,” she said. She tried to sound like Gene Pitney, and “it came out sounding like Ethel Merman.” After a while, “you start to feel that you’re just not good enough.”
But really, she was just no good at being anyone other than Cyndi Lauper. When she started writing and arranging songs for herself, “I told the stories that I knew about the women that I knew,” she said. “About my mom, my aunt, my grandmother.” They guided her back to the rhythms of her own life, even if, in the beginning, few were interested in listening. “My first concert was to 14 people,” she said, “and I did the encore, OK?”
The documentary’s title is a line ripped from a real-life courtroom drama: Early on, Lauper’s career got entangled in the ambitions of an ex-manager, who sued her to retain control of her music. She sank into bankruptcy trying to escape him. When the judge sided with Lauper, he banged the gavel and said, “Let the canary sing.”
Once freed, Lauper connected with Robert Hazard, who had written a track called Girls Just Want to Have Fun. He’d arranged it as a rock song from a man’s perspective — the girls were the ones he imagined sleeping with — and Lauper had some edits. She recast it as a gleeful public announcement, calling out a sexist double standard (“Oh, mama dear, we’re not the fortunate ones”) while claiming liberation from the workplace, the home and the patriarchy. And she rearranged the notes, pitching her voice so high that it could not be ignored. “I sang that high because I was trumpeting an idea,” she said.
And then there was the video. “That video was what you call ‘inclusive’ nowadays, and that was the most important thing,” Lauper said. In addition to Italian American pro wrestler Lou Albano, Lauper featured her mother, her lawyer, her manager, a crop of record company secretaries, and a racially diverse group of singers and dancers. “I was sick of the segregation” of the music industry, she said. “It’s people together that create a style.”
MTV was still in its infancy in 1983, and it was fortuitous that Lauper’s debut album, She’s So Unusual, came out just as the network was ascending. She saw her public image as a visual art form. Her makeup artist was a painter, and her stylist was a vintage buyer.
“People sometimes get the wrong idea that it was very thrown together,” Laura Wills, the founder of the vintage shop Screaming Mimi’s, said of the singer’s style. “People just didn’t look like that.” In the early ‘80s, Lauper worked for Wills, often bartering her labour for clothes. When her career took off, Wills started styling her, and the pair often constructed Lauper’s outfits as if sliding chips across a poker table, as in, “I’ll see your polka-dot socks and striped capris, and I’ll raise you a plaid top,” Wills said. “I’ll see your polka-dot socks, striped capris and plaid top, and I’ll raise you a paisley hat.”
Lauper seemed to shoot to fame as a fully formed feminist icon. She refused to tell interviewers her age (“I’m not a car,” she said), and she insisted that they recognise the politics behind her aesthetic choices. “I wore the corset to undo the power of the binding of women,” she told the press. She graced the cover of Ms. magazine and recorded the 1986 song True Colors, which resonated with her in the wake of a friend’s death from Aids.
“I know that I probably lost business because I talked about Aids a lot,” she said, but figured “I ought to stand up like any good Italian and stick up for my family, you know?” In 2008, she founded True Colors United to help combat homelessness among LGBTQ+ youth. And in 2022, she created the Girls Just Want to Have Fundamental Rights fund to support abortion access and other reproductive justice movements.
In 1985, Lauper won the best new artist Grammy after the release of She’s So Unusual. The album — and songs like Time After Time and All Through the Night — broke records. But something odd was happening. She looked around and saw versions of herself everywhere. “When I first became famous, I felt like the whole world just kind of went” — here Lauper made a sharp slurping noise — “and sucked everything up. The jewellery, the colour, the corsets on the outside, the whole thing. And then used it. Spit it out. Next!”
Lauper was accused of being a manufactured package. “No, it was me. That’s how I dressed. That’s how I looked. That was my community,” she said. “I have a brain.”
When Lauper got a call that a movie studio was adapting her big hit into a movie, she balked at its fluffy premise. “I guess it was about a couple of girls ... trying to have fun,” she said. (Sarah Jessica Parker and Helen Hunt starred.) Lauper refused permission to use her song, so it featured Hazard’s version with other vocalists instead. “For me, it sucked,” she said. “You took my style. And it had nothing to do with me at all.”
In the ‘80s, Lauper was compared so closely to other female musicians that it was implied there was not space for all of them. She was pitted against other women — mainly Madonna, who released her debut album the same year. On chat shows and in schoolyards (and even on the charity single We Are the World), celebrities and fans were asked to choose one. “It was like apples and oranges,” Lauper said. Or as she put it in Newsweek in 1985, “She’s just doing her thing. My thing happens to be different.” It was a shame, Lauper said: “I would have liked to have a friend.”
Although she fought her battles mainly alone, Lauper has inspired generations of women. Among her acolytes are Nicki Minaj, who in April brought her onstage in Brooklyn to duet on the song that samples her, Pink Friday Girls. When an interviewer asked the 26-year-old singer-songwriter Chappell Roan, “How does it feel to be called the Gen-Z Cyndi Lauper?” she replied, “I think Cyndi Lauper is the Gen-Z Cyndi Lauper.”
Lauper made 11 more albums after her debut — among them a blues record, a country record and a dance record. In the early 2000s, she walked over to Broadway, starring in The Threepenny Opera and writing the music and lyrics to the musical Kinky Boots after Harvey Fierstein, who wrote the book, tapped her for the gig.
“There’s a small group of people I consider my children; she’s one of my daughters,” the actor and writer, 72, said. Fierstein added that he had suspected Lauper’s talents were underused in rock, and he wanted to see what it was like for her to write a song that she would never sing herself.
“My favourite was a recording she made on her phone, in the beauty parlour, with her head in the dryer,” he said. (Lauper was often multitasking.) Her autoharp competed with the salon noise. “It’s really hard to sell a $10 million production on a recording of an autoharp song with a dryer background,” he said. “But that’s what we did.”
Lauper won the Tony for best score, the first woman to win alone.
In an industry that requires the rapacious pursuit of the new and the cynical extraction of identity, Lauper was never willing to abandon herself. She had forged the revolutionary style, sang the totemic song. She inspired millions, billions, of fans to be themselves. Why should she have to change who she was?
As Lauper and I traversed the Upper West Side, we ducked into an exhibition about abstract artist Sonia Delaunay, passed the original Screaming Mimi’s location (now a dry cleaners), and wound back to her apartment, where she invited me up.
Past the doorman, past a cheetah-print doormat and a cheetah-print curtain, two little pugs named Lulu and Ping awaited Lauper’s return. She disappeared to arrange a plate of ginger cookies, the same kind Jackson Browne always sent her on Christmas, while her husband, actor David Thornton, told me about their meet-cute on the set of the 1991 film Off and Running. She played a fake mermaid; he played a murderer. Off the set, he was struck instantly by her winning sense of humour.
“She’s the Rodney Dangerfield of rock ‘n’ roll,” he said — as in, she is so funny that she does not always receive the respect she deserves. “I don’t think anybody has any idea how hard she works,” he said.
To prepare for the tour, she blasts the stereo in her apartment and dances and sings, vexing the pugs. She works with a vocal coach four days a week. And she trains like it’s a sport. Her weekly exercise routine includes physical therapy, weights, stretching, physical therapy, weights, yoga, more weights, yoga, aerobics, physical therapy, weights again. She’s been chomping on enormous salads that make her feel like a horse.
“But when you’re a singer, you have to be an athlete,” she said. “You can’t [expletive] around. When you’re 20, yeah. But when you get older? No.”
As the tour approaches, she’s been daydreaming about “all the crazy stuff I tried that didn’t work” in the long arc of her career. The butterfly-winged black dress that she was meant to reveal as she stepped out of a cocoon. The bit where she was supposed to change behind a backlit screen like an old cartoon character. A kind of mechanical skirt that resembled a globe, slowly spinning her around as she sang.
She’s not exactly sure what she’ll pull off this time. Whatever changes, one thing remains the same: “Who the hell I am is who the hell I am.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Amanda Hess
Photographs by: Thea Traff and Sara Krulwich
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES